The meteoric rise of the industry summit proves that professionals no longer want a passive symposium where experts simply read from papers; they want interactive spaces that drive real-world change?? I don't know; I literally got this sentence from ChatGPT.
At some point, Eswatini collectively decided that a meeting was no longer simply a meeting. It became a summit. A business discussion became a business summit, a gathering of creatives became an art summit, family businesses got their own summit, women have summits, young people have summits, agriculture has summits, leadership has summits, wellness has summits and, if the subject is important enough to get a venue, a programme and a panel of speakers, it can probably become a summit.
There is nothing particularly wrong with this. In fact, some of the conversations happening at these events are necessary, and there is real value in getting people from different parts of a sector into the same room. The question is not whether Eswatini needs summits. The more interesting question is what we expect these summits to actually do, who gets to attend them and what happens after everyone has gone home.
The word itself carries a certain amount of importance. A summit traditionally refers to a meeting involving people at the highest level, while its literal meaning is the highest point of a mountain. Somewhere along the way, we took the word and started attaching it to almost every serious gathering involving a microphone, a backdrop and a registration fee.
Looking at Eswatini's events calendar this year, it is difficult not to notice how popular the format has become. The country has hosted the Eswatini Art Summit, the Regional Sugar Summit, the Family Business Summit and several other specialised gatherings, while more are still coming.
The upcoming eGumeni event is focused on women and conversations around mental health, trauma, addiction, workplace wellbeing and family dynamics.
The Seed Investment Summit is expected to bring together government, agriculture, investment and development stakeholders to discuss seed systems, policy and food security. The National Population and Development Summit is also planned for November, with researchers being invited to contribute work that will feed into the discussions.
These are very different events dealing with very different audiences, which is important because not every summit should be judged in the same way. A technical gathering about agriculture or population development is not the same thing as a wellness event, just as a family-business conference is not the same as a creative-sector gathering. Their objectives, audiences and expected outcomes are different.
What they have in common is the assumption that bringing people together creates value. Often, it does. The Eswatini Art Summit held in March, for example, brought more than 200 people from the creative sector together for discussions around making money from music, film, events and other creative work.
Those conversations were followed by announcements around a proposed dedicated fund for the creative sector. The fund still has to become something that artists can actually access before it can be considered a solution, but the movement from conversation towards a possible intervention is important. A summit becomes more meaningful when what is discussed in the room has somewhere to go afterwards.
The Family Business Summit provides another example of why these gatherings can be useful. Its discussions around succession, governance and building businesses that can survive beyond their founders address problems that many family-owned businesses eventually have to confront.
The latest summit brought together business owners, financial institutions, government representatives and other stakeholders, and the Minister for Finance, Neal Rijkenberg, also emphasised the importance of ensuring that the knowledge generated at the summit reaches businesses that were not able to attend.
A summit can be useful and still be inaccessible. The Family Business Summit's standard registration was E2,960, with an early-bird price of E2,850. For an established company, that can reasonably be treated as a professional development expense.
For a smaller business operating with limited cash flow, however, the same amount represents a very different decision. It could go towards stock, salaries, rent, transport, or other immediate business costs. The person running a small business may need the information being discussed at the summit just as much as the person who can comfortably afford to attend.
That is where the question of who these events are for becomes difficult. There is nothing unreasonable about charging for a professional conference. Venues cost money, speakers and facilitators have to be paid, catering and technical production have costs, and organisers cannot be expected to carry all of that themselves.
The problem comes when the subject of the event is empowerment, inclusion, wellbeing or economic opportunity and accessibility is treated as though it begins and ends with the ticket price. Take a wellness event costing E250.
On paper, E250 may appear relatively affordable compared with a professional conference costing thousands of emalangeni. But the person attending may also need to pay for transport, food, childcare or time away from work.
For someone who is unemployed or already under financial pressure, E250 can be a significant amount of money. The person who most needs a conversation about mental health may therefore be less likely to attend a paid event about mental health.
That does not make the event unnecessary. It simply means that organisers have to think beyond the ticket. There are different ways of dealing with this. Organisers can reserve sponsored spaces, work with community organisations, offer lower-cost places to students or small businesses, livestream selected sessions or make practical resources available after the event.
That makes logistical sense, but it also means that someone travelling from Lubombo or another part of the country has a different cost of participation from someone who lives nearby. A full-day event can also be difficult for someone who cannot take time away from work or family responsibilities.
This is particularly important when the language around an event suggests that it is intended for everyone. There is a difference between saying that an event is open to everyone and creating realistic conditions for everyone to participate.
The growing number of summits also raises another question: what exactly are people paying for? Networking is certainly one of the legitimate answers. There is value in putting people in the same physical space.
A young creative might meet a producer they would otherwise never have access to. A business owner might find a potential investor. Someone looking for a mentor might have a conversation with the right person during a coffee break. These connections are difficult to measure immediately, but they can become valuable over time.
The problem is that networking has also become one of those words that can mean almost anything at a conference. People exchange numbers, add each other to WhatsApp groups and promise to keep in touch. Sometimes those relationships develop into something meaningful. Sometimes the group becomes quiet before the month is over.
That does not make networking pointless. It simply means that the value of the connection is determined by what happens after the introduction.
The same applies to the information presented on stage. We are living in a time when it is remarkably easy to produce polished material about leadership, entrepreneurship, resilience, personal development and almost any other popular conference topic.
A presentation can be researched, written, designed and delivered without necessarily containing much that is specific to the people sitting in the room.
And yes, artificial intelligence is part of that conversation. There is nothing wrong with using AI to help organise ideas or prepare material. The problem comes when generic information is presented as though it is specialised expertise. If an entrepreneur pays to attend a business summit, they should be able to leave with more than a collection of familiar statements about believing in themselves, embracing change and unlocking their potential.
The value should come from the experience, knowledge and practical information that the speaker brings to the room. A business owner explaining exactly how they survived their first three years is more useful than another presentation about having an entrepreneurial mindset.
A financial expert showing small businesses how to manage cash flow is more useful than telling them that they need to become financially literate. A qualified mental-health professional explaining where people can access support is more useful than simply telling an audience that mental health matters.
A room can be full because people were curious, because a popular speaker was appearing, or because the event was heavily promoted. None of those things tell us what participants were able to do with what they learned.
One of the problems with measuring the success of a summit is that the things that are easiest to show are not necessarily the things that matter most.
A full room looks impressive in photographs, but it does not tell us whether the people who attended actually found useful opportunities or whether anything changed after they went home. The same applies to networking.
Two executives exchanging numbers may make for a good photograph and a promising LinkedIn post, but the real value of that introduction only becomes clear if it eventually leads to a business relationship, a contract, an investment or some other practical outcome.
The same principle applies to events centred on wellness, empowerment and mental health. A photograph showing hundreds of women gathered at a wellness summit tells us that people attended, but it cannot tell us whether the woman who arrived looking for help found a counsellor, accessed a service, or left with information she could actually use. Attendance is easy to count. Impact takes considerably longer to establish.
That does not make the summit format pointless, nor does it mean Eswatini has reached a point where there are simply too many events. The country needs spaces where people can meet, exchange information and build relationships, particularly in sectors where access to the right people can be difficult.
The issue is that the success of a summit should not end with the number of people who bought tickets or the number of photographs posted afterwards. If the purpose is to create opportunities, improve businesses, support people's wellbeing or influence a particular sector, then the conversation should eventually move towards what happened because those people were brought together in the first place.
This is also where organisers have an opportunity to make their events more useful beyond the people who can afford to attend. A business summit could make some of its practical resources available to small businesses that could not pay the registration fee.
A mental-health event could connect attendees and the wider public to actual support services rather than leaving the conversation at awareness. A creative-sector summit could publish the opportunities, funding information and contacts discussed during the programme so that an artist who could not afford the ticket still has access to some of the information.
The summit itself can still be valuable. The question is whether its value stays inside the conference venue or whether it manages to travel beyond it. There is also a responsibility on attendees. Not every event needs to produce a government policy, a new company or a life-changing contract.
Sometimes the benefit is simply meeting someone who gives you a useful piece of information or hearing an experience that changes how you approach your own work. Not everything valuable can be measured immediately. But that should not become an excuse for never measuring anything.
The more summits Eswatini hosts, the more useful it would be for organisers to explain what they hope will happen after the event. A summit that brings together family businesses can report on follow-up mentorship or succession planning.
A creative summit can track opportunities created for artists. A business event can show how many participants were connected to funding or markets. A wellness event can provide information on services and support available beyond the programme.
Those things may not be as glamorous as a stage, a celebrity speaker or a room full of delegates, but they give people a better idea of whether their time and money produced something useful. There is a good reason why the summit format has become so popular. People want access.
They want information. They want relationships. They want to hear from people who have experience in areas they are trying to understand. Businesses want customers and partnerships. Government wants stakeholders around the table. Organisations want visibility and credibility. Individuals want community.
Perhaps the next stage for Eswatini's summit culture is therefore not to have fewer summits, but to become more deliberate about what each one is supposed to achieve. If the country is going to keep gathering people in expensive hotels and conference centres to discuss its biggest challenges and opportunities, then the value of those gatherings should not disappear when the chairs are packed away.
The strongest summit is not necessarily the one with the biggest crowd, the most recognisable speaker or the most impressive backdrop. It is the one where people can point to something that became possible because the room existed in the first place.
So, WTF is a summit? At this point, it is a meeting, a networking opportunity, a business model, a learning space and, increasingly, its own category of event in Eswatini. There is nothing wrong with any of that. But perhaps we should stop allowing the word itself to suggest that something important must have happened simply because a group of people gathered under a large banner.
Call it a summit. Charge for it if the economics require it. Bring in the experts, the entrepreneurs, the policymakers, the creatives, and everyone else who needs to be part of the conversation. Just make sure the people who cannot get into the room are not completely left out of what happens inside it, and that when everyone leaves, there is something useful waiting on the other side of the door.
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